Army contractor drains stored nerve agent

Associated Press

NEWPORT, Ind. - An Army contractor began work Thursday on a project to destroy more than 250,000 gallons of a deadly Cold War-era nerve agent stored in western Indiana.

Workers drained two of about 1,600 hardened steel containers stored at the Newport Chemical Depot, about 30 miles north of Terre Haute, and transferred the combined 360 gallons of VX nerve agent into a holding tank, depot spokeswoman Terry Arthur said.

VX is a liquid with the consistency of mineral oil that can kill a healthy adult with a single pinpoint droplet.

On Friday, the VX will be pumped into a chemical reactor, mixed with water and sodium hydroxide and heated to about 194 degrees; a laboratory should confirm by Monday morning whether the chemical neutralization succeeded.

Arthur said samples will be taken periodically from the 1,000-gallon reactor during the neutralization process so the Army can determine exactly at which point the nerve agent's chemical bonds are destroyed.

"We want to test out everything to see how it worked, to make sure it's working the way we planned," she said.

The neutralization process is expected to take more than two years and produce a caustic chemical called hydrolysate that will initially be stored at the depot.

The Army wants to transport the hydrolysate - which has been compared to liquid drain cleaner - to a DuPont plant in New Jersey for treatment and disposal in the Delaware River. The plan has sparked opposition in New Jersey and Delaware.

VX was developed as a weapon to deter the Soviet Union, but the United States never used it. In 1969, President Richard Nixon ordered a moratorium on chemical weapons production